Database Connections: More Than Just Login Details

In ReportBurster, before you start building your reports, you configure your database connections.

Go to Configuration → Connections (Email, Databases) in the top menu to set up all your database connections.

Most reporting and enterprise systems treat database connections as a mere necessity—just a secure way to store login details for later use when generating reports or running application jobs. While database connections are certainly needed for that, in ReportBurster, they're much more.

The database connection can be the key to understanding your data model. And when you truly understand your data model, you can extract real value from your data. Understanding your data model is the foundation to understanding your enterprise applications, knowing what reports you need most, and how to create them efficiently.

Beyond Credentials: Understanding Your Data Model

Understanding your data model starts with knowing which tables and columns exist in your database and what kind of data they contain. That's why in ReportBurster, after you provide your database login details, you'll find a button labeled Test Connection & Fetch Database Schema.

When you click this button, ReportBurster first verifies that your login details are correct and can connect to the database. But it doesn't stop there—it automatically fetches the database schema metadata, identifying and listing all tables, column details, indexes, and more. This information is stored alongside your database login details for later use.

Just like that, you can now inspect and learn more about your database schema.

This alone significantly helps in understanding your data model, but ReportBurster goes even further.

Organizing Data by Business Areas

In many databases, especially for large enterprise applications (ERP, CRM, HR, billing, invoicing, etc.), data tables typically span multiple business areas. Seeing these tables grouped by their respective business areas helps you better understand the data and configure more meaningful reports with greater ease.

Generate Domain Schema with AI Help

This is where AI assistance begins in ReportBurster.

Instead of manually going through all the tables (which you could do if you have time and inclination), why not leverage AI to help group your table list into meaningful business areas for your enterprise application? The AI returns tables grouped by business domains, which you can then review and fine-tune until you're satisfied with the organization.

While there's value in having tables organized, don't spend too much time obtaining 'the perfect grouping'—when there are many tables, some organization is useful, but there's diminishing returns on achieving "perfect" organization.

Visualizing Relationships with ER Diagrams

Could we visualize our data model in a diagram where tables and their relationships are easier to understand? That's exactly what the ER Diagram (Entity Relationship Diagram) tab provides. The approach is the same—we use AI to draw the initial diagram, which you can then fine-tune until you're confident it accurately represents your data.

The same advice applies here—don't overdo it; there's no such thing as a 'perfect diagram'.

Now you have a comprehensive understanding of your database through three lenses:

1. The raw Database Schema
2. A Domain-Grouped Database Schema
3. An Entity Relationship Diagram

Understanding Your Data: The Ubiquitous Language

Ubiquitous Language, a term coined by Eric Evans in his Domain-Driven Design book, represents a common, shared vocabulary between developers, business analysts, and domain experts.

For your database connection, ReportBurster provides a dedicated space to document key business terms, rules, constraints, and concepts related to your schema. This ensures everyone interprets the data consistently and accurately.

Many business applications suffer from being built by developers who didn't fully understand the business, while requirements were produced by business people who didn't understand the development process. The result is that many current enterprise applications show this mismatch—their applications are somewhat useful but leave significant business value on the table.

With ReportBurster, even as "just a reporting software", we strive to improve this situation. By focusing more on understanding the data model and leveraging AI smartly, we help both business people and developers better understand each other. We believe that when done well, the distinction between domain experts and developers largely disappears.

Ubiquitous Language is the exact tool we need for that. When speaking about the enterprise system, business people won't use table names or class names but instead use their own business language and business terms.

By defining such a Ubiquitous Language of business terms, we strive to better understand and document our domain.

The most important value isn't just that, once we define a Ubiquitous Language, we can ask AI to generate reports using only business terms—which is certainly achievable. The real value lies in the process of defining and understanding our Ubiquitous Language itself. Through this exercise, we gain a deeper understanding of the domain and the true usefulness of our enterprise system.

Unlike the Domain-Grouped Database Schema and the Entity Relationship Diagram where AI does more of the initial generation (which we then refine manually), for the Ubiquitous Language, it's desirable to use AI less and instead come up with the business terms ourselves. Of course, you can still use AI when defining the Ubiquitous Language—nothing stops you—but it's better that your own contribution is greater, with AI serving as just a helpful hand to clarify.

The Future: Chat2DB

This is a prototype tab which is not yet fully implemented, but with which we envision integrating a Chat with your SQL database kind of tool similar to Vanna AI. This represents the last mile where a business user, developer, or even a regular user could literally start chatting with their database to ask all kinds of queries—from

"Tell me the SQL query for building this report..." to

"What are the top 5 selling albums?" or

"Show me total sales by country" or

"Which artists have the most tracks?"

This will be built based on real user demand. If you would benefit from such a Chat with your SQL database tool integration into ReportBurster, please don't hesitate to get in touch with us and let us know what exactly you're looking for.

Transforming How We Connect to Databases

As enterprise applications continue to grow in size and complexity, taking the effort to understand as many facets as possible of the data model becomes even more important. What's different now is that we have an additional (and very powerful tool) called artificial intelligence which, when smartly used, is a great asset that can help us understand and leverage our data even more.

Throughout ReportBurster you'll notice optional Hey AI, Help Me With... or Generate with AI buttons wherever we think AI can provide real help—starting from the moment you configure your database connections, through understanding your data model, to configuring reports (generating SQL queries, report templates, etc.) or creating beautiful branded email templates for your customers.

The database schema information listing tables, columns, etc., serves not only for better human understanding and usage—the same information is fed to AI so it can help you more effectively. For instance, when you seek AI help to generate an SQL query for a report, you'll need to select the list of tables you think are needed for the SQL. This list of tables and their columns is then passed in the AI prompt where you ask AI to help generate the needed SQL query for you. AI, having both your request formulated in natural language and the list of tables and columns involved, has much higher chances to give you back the exact SQL query you need. If your request is clear, the AI would return the correct SQL query on the first try (one-shot prompt), but if not, you can continue your chat with AI until you get your needed SQL query.

AI usage in ReportBurster is completely optional—we offer you the possibility to leverage AI, but you certainly don't have to if you don't want to. You can use ReportBurster to its fullest without ever touching AI-related buttons (though you're expected to know more SQL and coding in general when you do that).

If you want to learn more about our safe AI usage philosophy, read our dedicated documentation.

Database connections in ReportBurster are not just about storing credentials securely—they're about understanding your data deeply and unlocking its potential value. By combining traditional schema exploration with AI-assisted organization, visualization, and documentation, ReportBurster transforms a technical necessity into a business intelligence tool.

This approach bridges the gap between technical and business perspectives, enabling everyone in your organization to speak the same language when discussing data and reports.

Download ReportBurster to experience this new approach to database connections and data understanding.